Hidden hands across the ocean

Here we come to the heart of the matter 50 years of consistent denial that such a phenomenon existed in culture / blithely denying the existence of evidence / finally came to an end in the 90’s with the legal pressure to release documents, (in part) - something which could never have happened in the UK. So most of the analysis of what happened at the London end is extrapolated from the key US revelations.

It was the British who invented the phrase “Hidden Hands” during the First World War, during which they formed the forerunner of the Secret Service of James Bond fame. It was put together on an ad hoc basis to combat the presence in Britain of German spies ; due to which the universal passport was introduced. Then it was expanded to influence public morale and support of the war, the foreign word propaganda was only used in the most contemptuous terms during the Second World War, usually in relation to Goebbels’ methods - the Germans had their own hidden hands which came to the fore as they lost the war.

The success of the British experiment, very much a domain of gentlemen with genteel secretarial staff of good background, was such that the new arm was never dismantled and on this the later MI6 was developed once the second world war was declared.

This group was never concerned with cultural matters per se, although the level of education of those inside would have been cultured. The American comprehensive cultural post-war plan i.e. to back modernism - the art attacked by Stalin and Hitler, thus synonymous with democracy and freedom of speech, had from its start a seriously conflicting aim. Firstly to back the modern as future-oriented, good for business and industry, cocking a snook at the Soviet state mega-culture while copying its heavy bureaucracy and committee structure... Secondly to square that with the concurrent paranoia that the leftist modernists were pinkos and commies and thus a threat to American capitalism in some immediate manner. Hence we get McCarthyism, whose witch-hunt didn’t leave New York unscathed. While the all-American modernists, being groomed as touched by untamed genius, were told to drop any reference to politics in their interviews and public pronouncements.

So some very careful orchestration had to happen on an on-going basis ; the rough-hewn class of genius preferred was also an asset - no chance of the Soviets saying it was an elite and that in turn twisted the arm of the haughty British to find equivalents : no easy matter but they did it. In the short-term it was a win-win operation, leading to the Olympics of the Venice Biennale where the pyramid structure of the new culture was shaped : Western modernism beats fuddy-duddy Social Realism and the Americans dominate at the top of the pyramid on a permanent basis - (one in the eye to France, as usual, being superior).

So Pollock, Rothko et al. came with huge works transported at state expense and the drum-beat never faltered for decades. Every phase of the original avant-garde was re-cycled and that is still the case... sometimes the fourth or fifth morph. Everyone sees it’s in a degenerate mess but no-one can think up anything better - original thinkers who did it the first time round have never found fertile ground to develop.

On a personal level I had unwittingly shaken the hand of one of the enablers in London (probably many of the mole variety). This was at a party given by the US embassy in the early 60’s in London to which young British modernists were invited - we were all far too innocent to delve into this kind of investment. The host’s name I recalled by chance - Stephan Munsing. In 1997 I was talking to another British artist of the same era, also living in France, when en passant I brought this up and mentioned that name: he said immediately “CIA”. Although I’d had contact with him intermittently throughout the decades he’d never mentioned this. In other words he was a rare exception in grasping the scenario, because he’d also been involved with poetry and writing and had witnessed at close range the Stephen Spender/Encouter affair - including a public/personal challenge to him. For which he got served with defamation papers by Spender and he had no funds for a libel case. Probably Spender was being backed by Encounter - to intimidate those whom they knew to be speaking the truth. While defending publicly, freedom of speech and ideas! Spender claims to have been naive but here was proof that couldn’t entirely have been the case - he would have imbibed the internalized principles (see back section).

So these cultural plans didn’t flinch at direct harm to those in the arts and throughout many careers of better people were destroyed or never begun - now the milieu attracts only a totally different class. My friend tried to approach several people of influence at the time re. the cultural CIA activity and was treated as unstable - he stopped - since he was only harming himself: one of the people he told was Lawrence Alloway, a leading influence in welcoming the American invasion and pressuring locals to form shadow teams. Later he left for good for the US, where he never got the same level of backing from the hidden hands... once there, locals were in control, Americans.

“The adept in warfare always seek victory from an opportune situation and relies little on the efforts of individuals. He chooses men to fit the situation. In this his action is comparable to moving logs and stones.”

Sun Tzu - The Art of War